Security forces battling pockets of resistance in a mountainous Taliban stronghold killed at least seven militants yesterday and injured several more, officials said, as militants kidnapped and killed a prominent pro-government activist in another tribal area where the government claims to have near-total control.
A group of about 60 militants stormed the house of Jahangir Khan late on Saturday night in the town of Khar and abducted him, said Adalat Khan, an official in the town, the largest in the Bajur tribal region.
“The bullet-riddled body of Jahangir Khan was found a kilometer away from the main town, with his legs and hands tied with a rope,” he said.
Khan had apparently been dragged before being shot, he said.
The same group of militants also kidnapped one of the town’s most powerful landlords along with his son, his grandson and another relative. It was not immediately clear why they were kidnapped, though they may be held for ransom.
Pakistan launched a major offensive in Bajur last year and now insists it has total control nearly everywhere in the region, including in Khar — a claim undercut by the Saturday attacks and a series of other violent incidents in recent months.
Yesterday’s fighting took place in the village of Kaniguram, which Pakistan attacked during its two-week-old offensive in South Waziristan, one of the semi-autonomous tribal regions where the Taliban has grown in power in recent years.
The officials, from Pakistan’s intelligence branches and the paramilitary Frontier Corps, spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the media.
Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said on Saturday that the country had no choice but to defeat the militants.
“We are at war,” he told a press conference in Peshawar, where a car bombing a few days ago killed more than 115 people. “Our civil leadership, our military leadership and political leadership ... we are on the same page that we have to fight the militancy. We do not have any other option because their intentions are to take over” the country.
On Saturday, seven paramilitary soldiers driving through the Khyber tribal area were killed in a roadside bomb planted by suspected Taliban militants, local official Ghulam Farooq Khan said.
The area is famed for the Khyber pass, the main route for ferrying supplies to US and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
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